My eyes hurt. I’ve been scrolling past this formatting character called the “pilcrow” for a very long time. When I close my eyes, I can see pilcrow afterimages.

Spongebob character screaming about his eyes

I feel like all SpongeBob stills are slightly eerie.

The Smashwords Style Guide by Mark Coker has been my constant companion this week. Here are just some of the things I’ve been obsessing over:

  • Hidden words and formatting
  • Reflowability – the way words automatically wrap around the screens on your gadgets
  • Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes (I’m glad that Emily Dickinson didn’t have to fuss over Unicode or special character menus.)
  • Paragraph styles: block vs. first line indents
  • My strange, recurring typos (Even though the story has already been edited, I’m still checking it obsessively with the Find feature. I have this weird tendency to write “you” instead of “your.” It’s like my left pointer finger is just too lazy to hit that letter.)

So yeah. This is the week of tweezers and magnifying glasses. I gotta run and get back to formatting.